Eco-Justice: What is it and What can We do about it?

Rev. Amy Russell - 2008-08-17

A few years ago, I had the pleasure of performing a wedding for a family member at her grandfather’s estate in Lexington, KY. The beautiful estate had been in their family since the 1780’s. This woman, Garrett, my cousin’s daughter, is a very unusual young lady who at the time had just finished a master’s degree in religion and is currently finishing her dissertation on the culture and land practices of indigenous people in Peru.

When I met with this young couple to plan their wedding they told me that the theme of their wedding was the land that sustains them. They had both grown up in Kentucky and had returned here after being educated elsewhere. They had become aware of how their ancestors had used their Kentucky land to sustain and nurture their families for years. The couple in planning their wedding honored the sustaining land by having all the food for the reception provided by their friends and family who had grown the vegetables, raised the cattle, baked the cakes, and even brewed some of the beer. The groom’s mother had baked ten individual wedding cakes, all of natural ingredients.

Their wedding ceremony spoke of this Garden of Eden where both their families had cared for the land over the years, and how the land in turn had nurtured them. This natural symbiotic relationship was the foundation, they said, of the kind of love they had for each other. They vowed to care for each other and for the land where they were born as if it were a part of their family.

Attending the wedding that day was Wendell Berry, whose poem we read today. Berry is a native Kentuckian who writes in his poetry and essays about the sacredness of land. In the poem we read today he says, “I see all that we have ruined in order to have, all that was owned for a lifetime to be destroyed forever.”

He also says in an essay about ignorance, “Ignorance plus arrogance plus greed sponsor better living with chemistry”, and produces the ozone hole and the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. A modern science ‘applied’ by ignorant arrogance resembles much too closely an automobile being driven by a six-year-old or a loaded pistol in the hands of a monkey.” (Berry, Wendell, The Way of Ignorance, p. 220) Berry describes in this essay the way that our society has presumed to know the future by forgetting the past. He reminds us that our ignorance of everything that has happened to us allows us to create a future that does not contain a place for humans to live morally in concert with nature.

Wendell Berry grew up in Kentucky as the son of generations of farmers. After he married and had two children and not finding a place where they felt comfortable in the world, he returned to the Kentucky farm land near where he had been raised to be a farmer and a writer. He describes the farm where his family grows most of their food, most of their fuel, and where he says, they find a “sustaining pleasure.”

At General Assembly this year, there was a speaker who blew away the participants with his incredible exuberant talk during the Ware Lecture. His name is Van Jones. I had never heard of him and I doubt many of you have. He has not written any books. But he has been extremely active in advocacy for prison reform and in founding several organizations that work toward bringing environmental and justice issues together. He is the director for the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights which promotes positive alternatives to violence and incarceration. He has founded Green Job Corps which trains youth for eco-friendly jobs. Van Jones has also been active in working with business in California to attract environmentally sound industries.

In his talk, Van Jones used the word “Stagflation” to describe the current economic situation with rising energy prices causing inflation and resulting job losses causing purchasing to go down. We’re addicted to the carbon based fuels that are not renewable and have us caught in a bind in relying on foreign oil. He said that we as a nation can choose to remain addicted to carbon and oil based fuels or we can start realizing that we can “invent and invest” our way out of this mess. He speaks about a “Green New Deal” that would create millions of new jobs in the eco-friendly industries. If we moved our investments into new sustainable energies, we could create jobs that boost the economy as well as lessening our dependence on foreign oil. And he goes a step further. Van Jones suggests that we provide government money to train unskilled workers and people coming out of prisons for these green jobs. He admits that it will cost much more money to train people with no skills for these green jobs. However, Van Jones says that we will end up spending much more money to house prisoners who don’t succeed outside of prison because they have no skills to work. It costs a lot less in the long run to have people working in jobs paying a living wage, than to end up incarcerating people who have tried to make a living illegally.

Jones ties together environmental issues with justice issues in a way that he says will be our only hope out of our current situation. We need to green our cities and he suggests that we start with our ghettos.

Bringing together ecology and justice issues in complex society wide solutions is the purpose of this new endeavor called “Eco-Justice”. Underlying this movement are values that resonate with UU’s. The values of this movement are fairness and equal opportunity for all in creating creative solutions for a prosperous economy and to sustain the earth. The common good for the planet and its people are at the foundation of the purpose of eco-justice.

Eco-Justice examines world-wide issues that are totally inter-connected. People working in this field connect the dots in areas like the economy, resource distribution, creation of sustainable energy sources, and protection of the environment. At the heart of all these issues are the long range viability of the planet and its creatures, including people. Eco-justice asks us not to look at issues just from one viewpoint, like from a particular population’s view. When we look from only one point of view, we only see how an issue will affect some people, or some creatures, or some of the earth’s resources. It’s the big picture lens that we must use if we push at a problem from one side or pull it from another. An eco-justice view examines what any particular solution does to the environment, the world-wide use of resources, the economies of the world, and all the creatures in their unique environments.

One author puts it this way:
Every decision we make, to be a good decision, must be good for the whole system…
…if a decision is good for adults, and not children-good for whites and not people of color, good for rich and not for poor, good for the First World and not the Third World, good for humans and not good for plants, animals, the ozone layer and air and water, good for the present, but not the future- it is a BAD decision and we will come to regret it.

Within an interconnected system everything and everyone, wins- or nothing wins.
- Elizabeth Dodson Gray, from Eco-Justice- the Unfinished Journey, William Gibson, editor, p.51.

When Wendell Berry moved back to Kentucky with his wife and kids in 1965, he saw that many of farm families that he had known were now gone, forced out of business by major agribusiness corporations. He remembered the time when his grandfather had farmed the land with mules and he himself had learned how to farm this way. Over the years, he saw the tractors and other technology replacing the old way of farming. And while productivity went way up, he saw that a way of life was gone. And he saw that the way of honoring the land and the animals was also gone.
Family farmers have been forced out of business at an alarming rate. Every week 330 farmers are forced to shut down because they cannot compete with large agribusiness enterprises. In our country of the remaining, two million farms, only 565,000 are family operations.

In addition to the loss of the way of life of small family farms, there are many losses to our culture and environment as these small farms fail. Family farmers were always responsible stewards of the land. Since family farmers live on or near their fields, they can’t afford to pollute their own land. The small farmer seeks to protect his land for his future and future generations. These farmers can’t afford to use the kind of pesticides that never leave the land, producing noxious fumes so that future generations cannot re-use the land for farming.

Family farmers are dedicated to their land and to their community. They are a part of their community and try to use sustainable farming techniques to protect the valuable resources that farming land represents. Family farmers help support the local farming community by providing jobs and buying their goods locally. Large agri-businesses have mechanized many of the roles in the farming industry causing the local area around them to lose jobs.
One of the major sources of pollution in communities with large farming complexes is produced by the storage of manure in huge storage units. Manure stored this way creates a huge amount of methane gas. If animals or people are living nearby, this creates a major source of pollution in the air they are breathing. The four main hazardous gases that are produced by methane production cause of wide range of health and environmental hazards.

The move from family farming to corporate farming is just one example of how changes in business causes lifestyle changes, changes in air quality and land sustainability, and changes in local economies. One area of life affects so many other inter-connected areas. There is no one industry or technology that doesn’t affect all of our lives in ways that we can’t even see. The farming that takes place in our communities affects the local economies, the local ecosystem, the sustainability of natural resources, the lifestyles of the people – in fact, everything in that community is affected. The interconnected web creates widespread dependencies and influences that are so complex, they are difficult to ever unwind.
So, what can we do, we ask? How can we ever affect this myriad complex of inter-dependencies?

Van Jones in speaking to the General Assembly of UU’s said that we had finally made a difference in the world. He said, “You and people like you have long been telling the world that we must be aware of how we live our lives on this planet. And finally it turns out that you are no longer Eco- Freaks- you’re Eco-Sheik!” So, he gave us some recognition for being the tree-huggers that we have long been known to be.

So, I know I’m preaching to the choir on this one. Most of you have long been re-cycling your trash, being careful about the kind of containers you buy food in, watching the products you use in your yards, being aware of the cars you buy and some are even aware of their “carbon footprint”.

I’m certainly not the one to preach to you on that, since I’m still struggling with all of that. There is one thing that I’d like to see us consider. I know some of you have been considering the Green Sanctuary program offered by the UUA. This program outlines a series of steps that we as a congregation can take to be more aware of the actions we take that affect our eco footprint in the world. The steps include educating ourselves about environmental issues. I would strongly recommend that we find a way to move toward either that program or something like it.

Eco-justice tells us that it’s not just the green actions we take that are important; it’s all the actions we take that affect the world and its people. For instance, in June you voted to accept a Board recommended budget that included offering some contribution toward health costs to our employees who work more than 20 hours. This action is an example of how we are moving to understand how we can be “eco-just”.

When Van Jones ended his lecture at GA, he said something that was a good warning. He said that often when we see wrongs in the world, we tend to find the Goliath that we can blame them on. We become the small David with our slingshots and go out hunting for the Goliath we want to fight. He suggested that instead of using that biblical image, we should consider ourselves Noah. As Noah, we can go out in the world and find the communities who want to join us in building an ark. We can become supporters of those who are out there already building arks. And we can find the creatures who two by two or thousands by thousands can board the ark we build together.